A question after first campaing on easy escenario with marauders

[TelcontarVI]

Hi I'm a casual player of AI War 1 (never beaten a 7/7 game) So i tried the most easy game suggested in AI War 2: Single AI 3 with friendly marauders.

I'm a low AIP player, barelly surpassing 100 after capturing a golem, and reducing it to 80 after, but the scale of the waves varied a LOT in the game. There were late game waves of 2 strenght, and there were waves of 200 strenght. Why that differente? Maybe the work of the overexcited Marauders wich almost conquer the entire galaxy?

They have few planets of their own, but they were extended everywhere, even killing a few AI command stations (which not raised my AIP, but builmy base in those planets still cost +20 in AIP)

They even detroy the AI Homeworld!!! (i flattened their  path) It was a total surprise to me what happens after, but i succeded so i won the campaing. But i miss the opportunity to learn how to attack the Homeworld, allway the most dangerous time in AI War 1

[tadrinth]

Yeah, friendly marauders can expand VERY aggressively once they get going.

The variance in wave sizes was probably due to the marauders, yeah.  If you play by yourself, you should see a lot less variation in wave sizes.  They should pretty much go up and down with AIP.

The other possibility is that the AI decided to send a reconquest wave against a planet, if it noticed that you'd just taken a system and hadn't built turrets yet.  The AI sub-faction that tries to re-conquer your planets gets its own budget, and will sometimes launch much smaller waves if you have an undefended planet that it thinks it can take back.

[Draco18s]

There's also some flex, if the AI decides not to send a standard wave (because the target is too well defended), it can bank those points for the next one. There's a limit on how much it can do that (I think if it skips it has to send the next one), but that could be part of it too.

There's a lot of analysis going on under the hood that makes the AI a dynamic challenge. Its all generally considered fair, up to about difficulty 8 (at which point the gloves start coming off).